Convolutional Neural Networks

Project: Write an Algorithm for a Dog Identification App

In this notebook, some template code has already been provided for you, and you will need to implement additional functionality to successfully complete this project. You will not need to modify the included code beyond what is requested. Sections that begin with '(IMPLEMENTATION)' in the header indicate that the following block of code will require additional functionality which you must provide. Instructions will be provided for each section, and the specifics of the implementation are marked in the code block with a 'TODO' statement. Please be sure to read the instructions carefully!

Note: Once you have completed all of the code implementations, you need to finalize your work by exporting the iPython Notebook as an HTML document. Before exporting the notebook to html, all of the code cells need to have been run so that reviewers can see the final implementation and output. You can then export the notebook by using the menu above and navigating to \n", "File -> Download as -> HTML (.html). Include the finished document along with this notebook as your submission.

In addition to implementing code, there will be questions that you must answer which relate to the project and your implementation. Each section where you will answer a question is preceded by a 'Question X' header. Carefully read each question and provide thorough answers in the following text boxes that begin with 'Answer:'. Your project submission will be evaluated based on your answers to each of the questions and the implementation you provide.

Note: Code and Markdown cells can be executed using the Shift + Enter keyboard shortcut. Markdown cells can be edited by double-clicking the cell to enter edit mode.

The rubric contains optional "Stand Out Suggestions" for enhancing the project beyond the minimum requirements. If you decide to pursue the "Stand Out Suggestions", you should include the code in this IPython notebook.

Why We're Here

In this notebook, you will make the first steps towards developing an algorithm that could be used as part of a mobile or web app. At the end of this project, your code will accept any user-supplied image as input. If a dog is detected in the image, it will provide an estimate of the dog's breed. If a human is detected, it will provide an estimate of the dog breed that is most resembling. The image below displays potential sample output of your finished project (... but we expect that each student's algorithm will behave differently!).

Sample Dog Output

In this real-world setting, you will need to piece together a series of models to perform different tasks; for instance, the algorithm that detects humans in an image will be different from the CNN that infers dog breed. There are many points of possible failure, and no perfect algorithm exists. Your imperfect solution will nonetheless create a fun user experience!

The Road Ahead

We break the notebook into separate steps. Feel free to use the links below to navigate the notebook.

Step 0: Import Datasets

Import Dog Dataset

In the code cell below, we import a dataset of dog images. We populate a few variables through the use of the load_files function from the scikit-learn library:

NOTE:

Make sure everything went as expected. The output from the following cell should be:

There are 133 total dog categories.
There are 8351 total dog images.

There are 6680 training dog images.
There are 835 validation dog images.
There are 836 test dog images.

Import Human Dataset

In the code cell below, we import a dataset of human images, where the file paths are stored in the numpy array human_files.

NOTE:

making sure that everything is going as expected... afterr running the following cell, you should get this output:

There are 13233 total human images.

Step 1: Detect Humans

We use OpenCV's implementation of Haar feature-based cascade classifiers to detect human faces in images. OpenCV provides many pre-trained face detectors, stored as XML files on github. We have downloaded one of these detectors and stored it in the haarcascades directory.

In the next code cell, we demonstrate how to use this detector to find human faces in a sample image.

Before using any of the face detectors, it is standard procedure to convert the images to grayscale. The detectMultiScale function executes the classifier stored in face_cascade and takes the grayscale image as a parameter.

In the above code, faces is a numpy array of detected faces, where each row corresponds to a detected face. Each detected face is a 1D array with four entries that specifies the bounding box of the detected face. The first two entries in the array (extracted in the above code as x and y) specify the horizontal and vertical positions of the top left corner of the bounding box. The last two entries in the array (extracted here as w and h) specify the width and height of the box.

Write a Human Face Detector

We can use this procedure to write a function that returns True if a human face is detected in an image and False otherwise. This function, aptly named face_detector, takes a string-valued file path to an image as input and appears in the code block below.

(IMPLEMENTATION) Assess the Human Face Detector

Question 1: Use the code cell below to test the performance of the face_detector function.

Ideally, we would like 100% of human images with a detected face and 0% of dog images with a detected face. You will see that our algorithm falls short of this goal, but still gives acceptable performance. We extract the file paths for the first 100 images from each of the datasets and store them in the numpy arrays human_files_short and dog_files_short.

Answer:

Question 2: This algorithmic choice necessitates that we communicate to the user that we accept human images only when they provide a clear view of a face (otherwise, we risk having unneccessarily frustrated users!). In your opinion, is this a reasonable expectation to pose on the user? If not, can you think of a way to detect humans in images that does not necessitate an image with a clearly presented face?

Answer:

I think it's fair to ask the user that, but it would be even better if we can accept any image posted by the user. We can detect object in images using cascade classifiers as shown here in this notebook. Or we can use other deep learning algorithms like YOLO.

We suggest the face detector from OpenCV as a potential way to detect human images in your algorithm, but you are free to explore other approaches, especially approaches that make use of deep learning :). Please use the code cell below to design and test your own face detection algorithm. If you decide to pursue this optional task, report performance on each of the datasets.

Step 2: Detect Dogs

In this section, we use a pre-trained ResNet-50 model to detect dogs in images. Our first line of code downloads the ResNet-50 model, along with weights that have been trained on ImageNet, a very large, very popular dataset used for image classification and other vision tasks. ImageNet contains over 10 million URLs, each linking to an image containing an object from one of 1000 categories. Given an image, this pre-trained ResNet-50 model returns a prediction (derived from the available categories in ImageNet) for the object that is contained in the image.

Pre-process the Data

When using TensorFlow as backend, Keras CNNs require a 4D array (which we'll also refer to as a 4D tensor) as input, with shape

$$ (\text{nb_samples}, \text{rows}, \text{columns}, \text{channels}), $$

where nb_samples corresponds to the total number of images (or samples), and rows, columns, and channels correspond to the number of rows, columns, and channels for each image, respectively.

The path_to_tensor function below takes a string-valued file path to a color image as input and returns a 4D tensor suitable for supplying to a Keras CNN. The function first loads the image and resizes it to a square image that is $224 \times 224$ pixels. Next, the image is converted to an array, which is then resized to a 4D tensor. In this case, since we are working with color images, each image has three channels. Likewise, since we are processing a single image (or sample), the returned tensor will always have shape

$$ (1, 224, 224, 3). $$

The paths_to_tensor function takes a numpy array of string-valued image paths as input and returns a 4D tensor with shape

$$ (\text{nb_samples}, 224, 224, 3). $$

Here, nb_samples is the number of samples, or number of images, in the supplied array of image paths. It is best to think of nb_samples as the number of 3D tensors (where each 3D tensor corresponds to a different image) in your dataset!

Making Predictions with ResNet-50

Getting the 4D tensor ready for ResNet-50, and for any other pre-trained model in Keras, requires some additional processing. First, the RGB image is converted to BGR by reordering the channels. All pre-trained models have the additional normalization step that the mean pixel (expressed in RGB as $[103.939, 116.779, 123.68]$ and calculated from all pixels in all images in ImageNet) must be subtracted from every pixel in each image. This is implemented in the imported function preprocess_input. If you're curious, you can check the code for preprocess_input here.

Now that we have a way to format our image for supplying to ResNet-50, we are now ready to use the model to extract the predictions. This is accomplished with the predict method, which returns an array whose $i$-th entry is the model's predicted probability that the image belongs to the $i$-th ImageNet category. This is implemented in the ResNet50_predict_labels function below.

By taking the argmax of the predicted probability vector, we obtain an integer corresponding to the model's predicted object class, which we can identify with an object category through the use of this dictionary.

Write a Dog Detector

While looking at the dictionary, you will notice that the categories corresponding to dogs appear in an uninterrupted sequence and correspond to dictionary keys 151-268, inclusive, to include all categories from 'Chihuahua' to 'Mexican hairless'. Thus, in order to check to see if an image is predicted to contain a dog by the pre-trained ResNet-50 model, we need only check if the ResNet50_predict_labels function above returns a value between 151 and 268 (inclusive).

We use these ideas to complete the dog_detector function below, which returns True if a dog is detected in an image (and False if not).

(IMPLEMENTATION) Assess the Dog Detector

Question 3: Use the code cell below to test the performance of your dog_detector function.

Answer:

Step 3: Create a CNN to Classify Dog Breeds (from Scratch)

Now that we have functions for detecting humans and dogs in images, we need a way to predict breed from images. In this step, you will create a CNN that classifies dog breeds. You must create your CNN from scratch (so, you can't use transfer learning yet!), and you must attain a test accuracy of at least 1%. In Step 5 of this notebook, you will have the opportunity to use transfer learning to create a CNN that attains greatly improved accuracy.

Be careful with adding too many trainable layers! More parameters means longer training, which means you are more likely to need a GPU to accelerate the training process. Thankfully, Keras provides a handy estimate of the time that each epoch is likely to take; you can extrapolate this estimate to figure out how long it will take for your algorithm to train.

We mention that the task of assigning breed to dogs from images is considered exceptionally challenging. To see why, consider that even a human would have great difficulty in distinguishing between a Brittany and a Welsh Springer Spaniel.

Brittany Welsh Springer Spaniel

It is not difficult to find other dog breed pairs with minimal inter-class variation (for instance, Curly-Coated Retrievers and American Water Spaniels).

Curly-Coated Retriever American Water Spaniel

Likewise, recall that labradors come in yellow, chocolate, and black. Your vision-based algorithm will have to conquer this high intra-class variation to determine how to classify all of these different shades as the same breed.

Yellow Labrador Chocolate Labrador Black Labrador

We also mention that random chance presents an exceptionally low bar: setting aside the fact that the classes are slightly imabalanced, a random guess will provide a correct answer roughly 1 in 133 times, which corresponds to an accuracy of less than 1%.

Remember that the practice is far ahead of the theory in deep learning. Experiment with many different architectures, and trust your intuition. And, of course, have fun!

Pre-process the Data

We rescale the images by dividing every pixel in every image by 255.

(IMPLEMENTATION) Model Architecture

Create a CNN to classify dog breed. At the end of your code cell block, summarize the layers of your model by executing the line:

    model.summary()

We have imported some Python modules to get you started, but feel free to import as many modules as you need. If you end up getting stuck, here's a hint that specifies a model that trains relatively fast on CPU and attains >1% test accuracy in 5 epochs:

Sample CNN

Question 4: Outline the steps you took to get to your final CNN architecture and your reasoning at each step. If you chose to use the hinted architecture above, describe why you think that CNN architecture should work well for the image classification task.

Answer:

Compile the Model

(IMPLEMENTATION) Train the Model

Train your model in the code cell below. Use model checkpointing to save the model that attains the best validation loss.

You are welcome to augment the training data, but this is not a requirement.

Load the Model with the Best Validation Loss

Test the Model

Try out your model on the test dataset of dog images. Ensure that your test accuracy is greater than 1%.

Step 4: Use a CNN to Classify Dog Breeds

To reduce training time without sacrificing accuracy, we show you how to train a CNN using transfer learning. In the following step, you will get a chance to use transfer learning to train your own CNN.

Obtain Bottleneck Features

Model Architecture

The model uses the the pre-trained VGG-16 model as a fixed feature extractor, where the last convolutional output of VGG-16 is fed as input to our model. We only add a global average pooling layer and a fully connected layer, where the latter contains one node for each dog category and is equipped with a softmax.

Compile the Model

Train the Model

Load the Model with the Best Validation Loss

Test the Model

Now, we can use the CNN to test how well it identifies breed within our test dataset of dog images. We print the test accuracy below.

Predict Dog Breed with the Model

Step 5: Create a CNN to Classify Dog Breeds (using Transfer Learning)

You will now use transfer learning to create a CNN that can identify dog breed from images. Your CNN must attain at least 60% accuracy on the test set.

In Step 4, we used transfer learning to create a CNN using VGG-16 bottleneck features. In this section, you must use the bottleneck features from a different pre-trained model. To make things easier for you, we have pre-computed the features for all of the networks that are currently available in Keras:

The files are encoded as such:

Dog{network}Data.npz

where {network}, in the above filename, can be one of VGG19, Resnet50, InceptionV3, or Xception. Pick one of the above architectures, download the corresponding bottleneck features, and store the downloaded file in the bottleneck_features/ folder in the repository.

(IMPLEMENTATION) Obtain Bottleneck Features

In the code block below, extract the bottleneck features corresponding to the train, test, and validation sets by running the following:

bottleneck_features = np.load('bottleneck_features/Dog{network}Data.npz')
train_{network} = bottleneck_features['train']
valid_{network} = bottleneck_features['valid']
test_{network} = bottleneck_features['test']

(IMPLEMENTATION) Model Architecture

Create a CNN to classify dog breed. At the end of your code cell block, summarize the layers of your model by executing the line:

    <your model's name>.summary()

Question 5: Outline the steps you took to get to your final CNN architecture and your reasoning at each step. Describe why you think the architecture is suitable for the current problem.

Answer:

(IMPLEMENTATION) Compile the Model

(IMPLEMENTATION) Train the Model

Train your model in the code cell below. Use model checkpointing to save the model that attains the best validation loss.

You are welcome to augment the training data, but this is not a requirement.

(IMPLEMENTATION) Load the Model with the Best Validation Loss

(IMPLEMENTATION) Test the Model

Try out your model on the test dataset of dog images. Ensure that your test accuracy is greater than 60%.

Comparison Between different models used in Transfer Learning:

Model Accuracy
VGG16 45.5742%
ResNet-50 81.9378%
Inception-V3 84.0909%
Xception 85.4067%

As we can see, the best model is Xception with 85.3% test accuracy.

(IMPLEMENTATION) Predict Dog Breed with the Model

Write a function that takes an image path as input and returns the dog breed (Affenpinscher, Afghan_hound, etc) that is predicted by your model.

Similar to the analogous function in Step 5, your function should have three steps:

  1. Extract the bottleneck features corresponding to the chosen CNN model.
  2. Supply the bottleneck features as input to the model to return the predicted vector. Note that the argmax of this prediction vector gives the index of the predicted dog breed.
  3. Use the dog_names array defined in Step 0 of this notebook to return the corresponding breed.

The functions to extract the bottleneck features can be found in extract_bottleneck_features.py, and they have been imported in an earlier code cell. To obtain the bottleneck features corresponding to your chosen CNN architecture, you need to use the function

extract_{network}

where {network}, in the above filename, should be one of VGG19, Resnet50, InceptionV3, or Xception.

Step 6: Write your Algorithm

Write an algorithm that accepts a file path to an image and first determines whether the image contains a human, dog, or neither. Then,

You are welcome to write your own functions for detecting humans and dogs in images, but feel free to use the face_detector and dog_detector functions developed above. You are required to use your CNN from Step 5 to predict dog breed.

Some sample output for our algorithm is provided below, but feel free to design your own user experience!

Sample Human Output

(IMPLEMENTATION) Write your Algorithm

Step 7: Test Your Algorithm

In this section, you will take your new algorithm for a spin! What kind of dog does the algorithm think that you look like? If you have a dog, does it predict your dog's breed accurately? If you have a cat, does it mistakenly think that your cat is a dog?

(IMPLEMENTATION) Test Your Algorithm on Sample Images!

Test your algorithm at least six images on your computer. Feel free to use any images you like. Use at least two human and two dog images.

Question 6: Is the output better than you expected :) ? Or worse :( ? Provide at least three possible points of improvement for your algorithm.

Answer: